Jean Buridan

The Reverend Jean Buridan
Born	c. 1301 Béthune, Picardy, Kingdom of France
Died	c. 1359 – c. 1362
Education
Alma mater	Collège du Cardinal Lemoine University of Paris
Philosophical work
Era	Medieval philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Scholasticism Nominalism Aristotelianism
Institutions	University of Paris
Main interests	Logic Grammar Metaphysics Natural philosophy Ethics
Notable ideas	Theory of impetus Modernization of Aristotelian logic Buridan's bridge

Jean Buridan (/ˈbjʊərɪdən/; French: [byʁidɑ̃]; Latin: Johannes Buridanus; c. 1301 – c. 1359/62) was an influential 14th‑century French scholastic philosopher.

Buridan taught in the faculty of arts at the University of Paris for his entire career and focused in particular on logic and on the works of Aristotle. Buridan sowed the seeds of the Copernican Revolution in Europe. He developed the concept of impetus, the first step toward the modern concept of inertia and an important development in the history of medieval science. His name is most familiar through the thought experiment known as Buridan's ass, but the thought experiment does not appear in his extant writings.

Life

Education and career

Buridan was born sometime before 1301, perhaps at or near the town of Béthune in Picardy, France, or perhaps elsewhere in the diocese of Arras. He received his education in Paris, first at the Collège du Cardinal Lemoine and then at the University of Paris, receiving his Master of Arts degree and formal license to teach at the latter by the mid-1320s.

Unusually, he spent his entire academic life in the faculty of arts, rather than obtaining the doctorate in law, medicine or theology that typically prepared the way for a career in philosophy. Also unusual for a philosopher of his time, Buridan further maintained his intellectual independence by remaining a secular cleric, rather than joining a religious order. A papal letter of 1330 refers to him as simply, "clericus Atrebatensis diocoesis, magister in artibus [a cleric from the Diocese of Arras and Master of Arts]." As university statutes permitted only those educated in theology to teach or write on the subject, there are no writings from Buridan on either theological matters or commentary of Peter Lombard's Sentences.

Speculation on his reasons for avoiding religious matters have remained uncertain. Most scholars think it is unlikely that he went unnoticed, given his philosophical talents. As well, it is unlikely that he could not afford to study theology, given that he received several bursaries and stipends. Indeed, he is listed in a document from 1350 as being among the teachers capable of supporting themselves without the need for financial assistance from the University. John Alexander Zupko has speculated that Buridan "deliberately chose to remain among the 'artists [artistae]'," possibly envisioning philosophy as a secular enterprise based on what is evident to both the senses and the intellect, rather than the non-evident truths of theology revealed through scripture and doctrine.

The last appearance of Buridan in historical documents came in 1359, where he was mentioned as the adjudicator in a territorial dispute between the English and Picard nations. It is supposed that he died sometime after then, since one of his benefices was awarded to another person in 1362.

The bishop Albert of Saxony, himself renowned as a logician, was among the most notable of his students.

An ordinance of Louis XI in 1473, directed against the nominalists, prohibited the reading of his works.

Apocryphal stories

Where is the very wise Heloise,
For whom was castrated, and then (made) a monk,
Pierre Esbaillart (Abelard) in Saint-Denis?
For his love he suffered this sentence.
Similarly, where is the Queen
Who ordered that Buridan
Were thrown in a sack into the Seine?
Oh, where are the snows of yesteryear!

— François Villon, Ballade des dames du temps jadis, 9–16

Apocryphal stories abound about his reputed amorous affairs and adventures which are enough to show that he enjoyed a reputation as a glamorous and mysterious figure in Paris life. None of the stories can be confirmed, and most contradict known historical information.

Some rumors hold that he died when the King of France had him put in a sack and thrown into the River Seine after his affair with the Queen came to light. François Villon alludes to this in his famous poem Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis. Others suggest that he was expelled from Paris due to his nominalist teachings and moved to Vienna to found the University of Vienna. Another story talks of him hitting Pope Clement VI with a shoe.

Impetus theory

The concept of inertia was alien to the physics of Aristotle. Aristotle, and his peripatetic followers held that a body was maintained in motion only by the action of a continuous external force. Thus, in the Aristotelian view, a projectile moving through the air would owe its continuing motion to eddies or vibrations in the surrounding medium, a phenomenon known as antiperistasis. In the absence of a proximate force, the body would come to rest almost immediately.

Buridan developed a theory of impetus by which the mover imparts to the moved a power, proportional to the speed and mass, which keeps it moving. In addition, he correctly theorized that resistance of the air progressively reduces the impetus and that weight can add or detract from speed. Buridan was the first to name this motion-maintaining property impetus but the theory itself probably did not originate with him. A less sophisticated notion of impressed forced can be found in the commentary of John Philoponus on Aristoteilan physics. In this he was possibly influenced by John Philoponus who was developing the Stoic notion of hormé (impulse). The major difference between Buridan's theory and that of his predecessor is that he rejected the view that the impetus dissipated spontaneously, instead asserting that a body would be arrested by the forces of air resistance and gravity which might be opposing its impetus. Buridan further held that the impetus of a body increased with the speed with which it was set in motion, and with its quantity of matter. This is closely related to the modern concept of momentum. Buridan saw impetus as causing the motion of the object:

...after leaving the arm of the thrower, the projectile would be moved by an impetus given to it by the thrower and would continue to be moved as long as the impetus remained stronger than the resistance, and would be of infinite duration were it not diminished and corrupted by a contrary force resisting it or by something inclining it to a contrary motion (Questions on Aristotle's Metaphysics XII.9: 73ra).

Buridan also contended that impetus is a variable quality whose force is determined by the speed and quantity of the matter in the subject. In this way, the acceleration of a falling body could be understood in terms of its gradual accumulation of units of impetus.

Legacy

Because of his developments, historians of science Pierre Duhem and Anneliese Maier both saw Buridan as playing an important role in the demise of Aristotelian cosmology. Duhem even called Buridan the forerunner of Galileo. Zupko has disagreed, pointing out that Buridan did not use his theory to transform the science of mechanics, but instead remained a committed Aristotelian in thinking that motion and rest are contrary states and that the universe is finite in extent.

Works

• Hughes, G. E. (1983). John Buridan on Self-Reference: Chapter Eight of Buridan's Sophismata. An edition and translation with an introduction, and philosophical commentary. Cambridge/London/New York: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-28864-9.
• King, Peter (1986). John Buridan's Logic: The Treatise on Supposition; The Treatise on Consequences. Translation from the Latin with a Philosophical Introduction, Dordrecht: Reidel.
• Zupko, John Alexander, ed. and tr. (1990). John Buridan's Philosophy of Mind: An Edition and Translation of Book III of His Questions on Aristotle's De Anima (Third Redaction), with Commentary and Critical and Interpretative Essays. Doctoral dissertation, Cornell University.
• Klima, Gyula, tr. (2002). John Buridan: 'Summulae de Dialectica'. Yale Library of Medieval Philosophy. New Haven, Conn./London: Yale University Press.
• John Buridan (2015). Treatise on Consequences, translated, with an Introduction by Stephen Read. New York: Fordham University Press.
• Klima, G., Sobol, P. G., Hartman, P., & Zupko, J. (2023, May 31). John Buridan’s Questions on Aristotle’s de Anima – Iohannis Buridani Quaestiones in Aristotelis de Anima (Vol. 9). Springer.

See also

• List of Roman Catholic scientist-clerics
• Buridan formula
• Nicole Oresme

From the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia

Jean Buridan — French scholastic philosopher of the fourteenth century, b. at Béthune, in the district of Atois towards the end of the thirteenth century; date of death unknown. He studied at the University of Paris under the Nominalist William of Occam, became professor in the faculty of arts, procurator of the Picardy "Nation", and (in 1327) rector of the university. In 1345, he was one of the ambassadors sent by the university to the papal court at Avignon. He is also said to have assisted in founding the University of Vienna. It is probable, however, that Buridan never went to Vienna, for it is certain that he was in Paris in 1358, and Father Denifle has shown (Chartul. Univ., Paris, II, 646) that the University of Vienna was not founded until 1365, when Buridan was so old that he could hardly have undertaken such a journey. His principal works are "Compendium Logicae", "Summa de Dialecticâ", and "Commentaries" on the works of Aristotle, the most important of the last being on the "Politics". A complete edition was published by Dullard, Paris, 1500, and has frequently been reprinted, e.g. Oxford, 1637, London, 1641.

Buridan was not a theologian. In philosophy he belonged to the Nominalist, or Terminist school of Occam, to which he adhered in spite of reiterated condemnation. He adhered, also, to that peculiar form of scepticism which appeared in Scholastic philosophy at that time, and which arose from the growing sense of the inadequacy of reason to solve the highest problems of thought. In his "Compendium Logicae" he developed at length the art of finding the middle term of a demonstration, and this, in the course of time (it is first mentioned in 1514), came to be known as "The Bridge of Asses", i.e. the bridge by which stupid scholars were enabled to pass from the minor or major, to the middle, term of syllogism. Still better known is the phrase "Buridan's Ass", which refers to the "case" of a hungry donkey placed between two loads of hay, equal as to quantity and quality and equally distant. The animal so placed, argued the dialectician, could never decide to which load of hay he should turn, and, in consequencs, would die of hunger. The "case" is not found in Buridan's writings (though the problem it proposes is to be found in Aristotle), and may well have been invented by an opponent to show the absurdity of Buridan's doctrine.

That doctrine began by denying the distinction between the different faculties of the soul. Will and intellect, said Buridan, are the same. Hence, to say that the will is free in any sense except that in which the intellect also is free, is to say that the will is freer than itself. The freedom of the will is the freedom of the whole soul. Human freedom consists, then, in the power of choosing between two or more desirable alternatives (libertas oppositionis). When the intellect presents one alternative as better (higher) than the other, the will must choose the former. When the will presents two alternatives as equally desirable, there can be no choice. (Here, probably, the opponent introduced the example of the ass, to ridicule Buridan's position.) The will, however, has still an expedient. It can postpone its decision, direct the intellect to consider one alternative only, and when the other alternative, even though it be better (higher), has dropped out of consciousness, the will can come to a decision and choose, if, indeed, its act can now be called a choice at all. Buridan, therefore, maintains that in a conflict of motives the stronger motive always prevails-the will is "determined" by the strongest motive. He is not a voluntarist. The will, he says, is inferior to the intellect, because the former presupposes the action of the latter, and depends on it. And it is by means of the intellect, and not by means of the will, that man lays hold of supreme happiness.

STÖCKL, Gesch. der Phil. des Mittelalters (Mainz, 1865), II, 1023 sqq.; ID., Lehrb. der Gesch. der Phil. (Mainz, 1888), I, 478; tr. FINLAY (Dublin, 1903), 427; TURNER, Hist. of Phil. (Boston, 1903), 408; UEBERWEG, Gesch. der Phil. (Berlin, 1905), II, 347; tr. MORRIS(New York, 1890), I, 465.

Bibliography

Sources

• Clagett, Marshall (1960). The Science of Mechanics in the Middle Ages (1980. ed.). Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 978-0299019006.
• Courtenay, William J. (2002). "Philosophy's Reward: The Ecclesiastical Income of Jean Buridan". Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie Médiévale. 68: 163–69. doi:10.2143/rtpm.68.1.859.
• Courtenay, William J. (2005). "The University of Paris at the Time of John Buridan and Nicole Oresme". Vivarium. 42 (1): 3–17. doi:10.1163/1568534042066974. S2CID 170742014.
• Faral, Edmond (1951). "Jean Buridan: Maître ès Arts de l'Université de Paris". Extrait de l'Histoire littéraire de la France. Vol. 1. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale.
• Michael, Bernd (1986). Johannes Buridan: Studien zu seinem Leben, seinen Werken und zu Rezeption seiner Theorien im Europa des späten Mittelalters [Jean Buridan: His life, his works and the reaction to his theories in the Europe of the late Middle Ages]. 2 Vols. Doctoral dissertation. University of Berlin.
• Zupko, Jack (1998). "What Is the Science of the Soul? A Case Study in the Evolution of Late Medieval Natural Philosophy". Synthese. 110 (2): 297–334. doi:10.1023/A:1004969404080. S2CID 149443888.
• Zupko, Jack (2004). John Buridan. Portrait of a Fourteenth-Century Arts Master. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. ISBN 9780268032562.
• Zupko, Jack (2015). "John Buridan". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. Retrieved 5 February 2019.

Further reading

• Klima, Gyula (2009). John Buridan. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Landi, Marcello (2008). "Un contributo allo studio della scienza nel Medio Evo. Il trattato Il cielo e il mondo di Giovanni Buridano e un confronto con alcune posizioni di Tommaso d'Aquino" [A contribution to the study of science in the Middle Ages. The sky and the world of Jean Buridan and a comparison with some positions of St. Thomas Aquinas]. Divus Thomas. 110 (2): 151–185.
• Thijssen, J. M. M. H., and Jack Zupko (ed.) (2002). The Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy of John Buridan Leiden: Brill.

External links

• Zupko, Jack. "John Buridan". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. ISSN 1095-5054. OCLC 429049174.
• Bibliography by Fabienne Pironet (up to 2001)
• Buridan's Logic and Metaphysics: an annotated bibliography (updates the bibliography of Fabienne Pironet to 2014)
• Buridan's Logical Works. I. An Overview of the Summulae de dialectica a detailed summary of the nine treatises of the Summulae de dialectica
• Buridan's Logical Works. II. The Treatise on Consequences and other writings a summary of the other logical writings
• Buridan: Editions, Translations and Studies on the Manuscript Tradition Complete bibliography of the logical and metaphysical works